MacFUSE file system plugin gets 64-bit support in 2.0 update

The Mac version of the Swiss army knife of file systems has been updated to …

MacFUSE, the Mac OS X version of the FUSE plug-in file system architecture, has been updated to 2.0. In addition to preliminary 64-bit support and a preference pane for easier installation and configuration, there are several under the hood changes for developers.

The latest version adds a preference pane that allows easy updating or uninstalling of MacFUSE. There is also extensive—though still experimental—64-bit support throughout the entire MacFUSE software stack. Of course, you must be running Leopard on 64-bit capable hardware to take advantage of the improvements. And though the next major revision of Mac OS X is still some months off, there is "highly experimental" support for Snow Leopard.

Many of the improvements are for developers creating file system plug-ins. In addition to support for file systems using 64-bit inodes, there are new Xcode project templates to make creating a file system even easier, and added DTrace support to make debugging easier as well. Several new callbacks for the ability to set and read file attributes, backward compatibility, and a couple small bug fixes round out the release. Detailed release notes are also available.

MacFUSE makes it easy to add support for non-native file systems, like NTFS or EXT3, via a FUSE plug-in. It also allows the creation of arbitrary file systems to access services like FTP, SSH, Flickr, or even all running processes on your system as if it were a disk in the Finder. MacFUSE 2.0 can be downloaded via Google Code.